Are All Major Environmental Organizations Cowards?An Environmental Article from All-Creatures.org

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In the face of that evidence, though, leading
environmental groups peddle the snake oil of untested or ridiculously
utopian “solutions”—such as rotational grazing and urban animal
agriculture—and insist that we can have our meat and eat it too. It’s a
terrible shame, almost as if the cure for a fatal disease were sitting on an
upper shelf but we decided it was too much effort to get off our ass and
reach for it.

Why is it that institutions with the power to initiate genuine beneficial
change diminish their own effectiveness? I’ve railed in the past against
mainstream environmental groups for refusing to promote veganic agriculture
as a critical component of ecological amelioration. The evidence is simply
overwhelming and undeniable: removing animals from agriculture would almost
totally resolve the defining environmental (not to mention ethical) problems
of global food production.

In the face of that evidence, though, leading
environmental groups peddle the snake oil of untested or ridiculously
utopian “solutions”—such as rotational grazing and urban animal
agriculture—and insist that we can have our meat and eat it too. It’s a
terrible shame, almost as if the cure for a fatal disease were sitting on an
upper shelf but we decided it was too much effort to get off our ass and
reach for it.

And it’s not as if these organizations aren’t willing to pursue
extreme measures to advance their agendas. Bill McKibben’s 350.org has
focussed like an attack dog on the XL Pipeline. Forget that abolishing this
pipeline would ensure that oil and gas would move across the nation through
less safe means [i.e., railroads], the point here is that 350.org has boldly chosen
to use the transcontinental pipeline as a symbol of the organization’s
desire to end the consumption of fossil fuels altogether and replace them
with alternative sources of energy. Doesn’t that strike you as more radical
than pursuing a meatless agenda? Once again, there’s something about meat,
and meat alone, that prevents making any suggestion that, for all its
problems, we give it up. (Oh, right, it tastes good).

What’s particularly
distressing about this cowardice, this craven refusal to call for the kind
of change that demands sacrifice (yes, I know, veganism is not a sacrifice,
but most people think of eschewing meat in that way) is the fact that even
organizations explicitly committed to animals and the environment refuse to
insist that veganism is the answer to our agricultural ills. In fact, with
HSUS leading the charge, they support the small and “humane” alternatives as
acceptable stepping stones to a stable alternative they refuse to explicitly
define, much less place on a billboard: a plant-based diet.

To provide a more
concrete sense of this cowardice, note what a representative from a notable
organization concerned with animal welfare wrote in response to a request
that the organization do an undercover investigation of a so-called “humane”
farm:

If we expose 'higher welfare' farms as being cruel too, then the
majority of people who would have otherwise reduced their consumption or
chosen higher welfare standards think it is useless to even try and stop
eating factory farmed animal products. So, instead of moving people closer
to the goal of veganism, it would have the effect of moving people further
away. (I think it’s similar to citizens who feel politically alienated and
powerless. Sometimes these individuals believe their vote doesn’t count and
so don’t they vote at all.)

My thoughts are many in response to this
rationalization. But first and foremost among them is this: if these
organizations don’t believe in their own mission, why should we?

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